The impact of a PEER funded research project "Development of Bridge Rapid Assessment Center for Extreme Events (BRACE2)" is highlighted below. The project Principal Investigator (PI) is Khalid M. Mosalam, Taisei Professor of Civil Engineering, UC Berkeley. The Research Team includes UC Berkeley Graduate Student Researchers Chrystal Chern, Claudio M. Perez, Guanren Zhou, Kwok-Tai (Issac) Pang, and Amarnath Kasalanati, PEER Associate Director, UC Berkeley.
Download the Research Project Summary which includes the abstract (PDF)
Research Impact
Highway bridges are a significant public investment, and their closure can have a profound impact on regional travel times. However, assessing the condition of these critical infrastructure components is a complex and challenging task. BRACE2 addresses this challenge by establishing a cutting-edge bridge monitoring platform, leveraging state-of-the-art communication, computation, and sensor technologies to provide real-time assessments of the structural condition of the trial bridges following earthquake events. This enables avoiding unnecessary closures when damage is minimal and pinpointing the location and severity of damage when it is extensive. Findings from the project will be incorporated into the open source mdof, sees, and sdof Python packages, as well as the newly redesigned and optimized OpenSeesRT framework for nonlinear structural analysis. Other commercial computational platforms like CSiBridge and DIANA FEA are also explored in this research project.
